Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:
First off, dump either antivirus or antispam on that machine. You don't have enough memory to keep both happy.
How about using MailScanner ? and wrap that around clamav + spamassassin, you can run it with 2 - 4 threads on a machine with 256megs of ram, and since spamassassin runs via its perl interface locally ( and not via spamd ), it uses up no resources while its not running.
Yeah, that will work for a month or 2. After than, the bayesian database will start to get huge, and spamassassin will take a lot of time to start and use a lot of memory.
for a 2k user density, it would be a good idea to cycle bayes db every so often, only on a site with 2 - 5 people would you really expect the bayes db to have data that is months and months old :) too much poison in the wild these days.
another option is to turn off bayes completely, and just use URIBL's like surbl.org - in most cases the final result is almost as good as with bayes - with the advantage of near zero false positives.
MailScanner might slow your inbound mail queue processing by a few seconds, but would allow you to better manage the resources you have on the machine ( and also implement any policy based email rules you might want to have )
After 2 months, on a 256M machine, spamassassin alone can slow a single e-mail by up to 2 minutes. Which can lead to a nice snowball issue.
I setup mailscanning services for a network that has 1500 users, ( no storage, just inbound smtp, scan and forward ) with MailScanner, spamassassin, clamav, fprot and bitdeffender - on a P-3 1.4ghz with 196MB ram and a 120gig hdd. The machine handles the traffic just fine. Last time I checked, it was doing 17k - 21k emails per day.
Also, on a machine with that setup, I'd have a Gig of Swap. And that 40GB hdd, i wonder how fast that runs :) might end up being the bottle neck in the equation.
The main tip would be to have the swap partition close to the middle of the disk, so you can reduce the disk head seek time. At least in theory, considering there is no sector realocation due to bad blocks.
Thats an interesting point. Would help, I am sure.
- K